My Million-Dollar Donkey (11 page)

It was going to be a cold winter. I knew this because Tommy, one of the construction workers, pointed out that the spiders were weaving their webs close to the rafters of the roof. I thanked him for this information, even though I was already privy to this year’s winter forecast thanks to the kids at school telling my son that the wasps were building their nests higher in the trees, a sure sign a brisk winter is on the way.

“The weather is going to be cold tonight,” I said, sliding into a seat across from Kathy.

“Yeah, I know. They were talking about what to expect at the feed store.”

Forget CNN or Newsweek. Just buy hay and you could get the scoop on everything that might affect you in the country. Even so, I still felt compelled to read the local paper, needing a more reliable source than hearsay at the feed store for my basic information. The Blue Ridge Observer was published twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. I read the paper from front to back, even before browsing my fancy Atlanta paper for macro-news about the world at large.

The local paper was where we learned Billy Bob was celebrating his second birthday with a cowboy party at the local McDonald’s. The paper featured articles about lifetime residents who had passed on, obituaries that included not only the deceased’s occupation and surviving family members, but which Baptist church they were affiliated with and how they won the pound cake bake-off at the Moonshine Festival three years in a row. Sensationalized articles made the reader’s heart beat faster, too. One week the mayor and two councilmen got arrested for gambling at a cockfight. Another week, a sting operation helped the sheriff close down a meth operation in a cabin not far from us. Sadly, a hound dog was killed in the process. A week later, the Piggly Wiggly busted a water main and all the veggies floated out to the parking lot. Great scandals like that made the paper entertaining and informative, in a surreal sort of way.

There were also announcements of things to do, such as watching a local reverend playing fiddle at the Shriner’s club on Fridays, festivals to visit, or church barbeques. Like all papers, there was a business section, too, and since building and tourism were the primary commerce in the area, lots of talk about the ongoing war over building codes filled the pages.

North Georgia didn’t have building codes until all the newer residents started arriving from Atlanta or Florida and began throwing their weight around, forcing laws to be put into place to protect the rights of homeowners. The editorials showcased the great battle constantly being waged between the city folk intent on bringing “progress” into the area and the lifetime residents who didn’t like change...or strangers...or Wal-Mart. Local residents wrote letters complaining about how all the halfbacks wouldn’t leave well enough alone. (A halfback is a person from up north who moves to Florida, but when they miss the change of seasons, move only halfway back where the weather is milder, thus landing in Georgia.) The transplants retorted with facts about how the added income from their taxes helped inch the schools out of the dark ages, and of course they tossed in remarks about how, if the people around here were educated enough to understand economics, they’d appreciate what the new population was bringing to the table.

The city people (this included us) were drawn to the area because they had a sincere appreciation for the serenity of the surrounding nature. The slow, meandering lifestyle calmed a stressed-out soul and helped a person touch base with what counted in life. But after people like us got comfortable, they started missing convenience (and Starbucks) so they pushed for little changes. They campaigned to get the dry county ordinance lifted so they could enjoy a glass of wine with dinner at a restaurant. They voted to let the Ritz Carlton build on the lake so everyone’s property values would go up. Of course, all these little changes added up to an unstoppable shift in the flavor of the little town, and the next thing you know, the very aspect that attracted everyone here was on the road to being lost. The property values would go up on paper, but living in a bustle-free environment,
sans
franchises, is what made the town priceless.

I understood the frustration of small town limitations, but Atlanta was a mere two hours away and I clung to the fact that I could always drive to the city to attend an author’s lecture or visit a museum when I needed a metropolis fix. Every time I went into the city, I came home grateful for the lack of traffic, noise, and crowds in our small town. But at the same time, I felt smothered by the endless quiet and lack of intellectual stimulus. The tale of the country mouse and the city mouse was a poignant puzzle with no answer in regards to which was best.

Thankfully, living in the country was ripe with novel experiences for a city couple like us, so life continued to be educational and adventurous. On my daily mail run, I’d stare at a dozen or so chickens wandering about the post office yard, scratching in the dirt, cackling, and waddling about in the sun like stage props carefully set about to enhance the ambience of the post office. I’d watch them from my car, marveling at the birds’ diverse shapes, colors, and quirky behavior. Then I’d go in to get the mail and spend a few minutes talking to the friendly postmistress, who not only knew me by name but had a pretty good clue about my personality, too, thanks to her checking out the mail I received. I’d return home thirty minutes later with arms full of mail that was now a mish-mosh of contradiction:
Fitness
,
Glamour
, and
Martha Stewart Living
magazines rubbing glossy elbows with
Country Living
,
Organic Gardening
and
Farmer’s Almanac
. I’d stack them all by the door and start breakfast, then drop hints about how nice cooking would be if the eggs I was poaching were home grown.

Mark knew better than to take the bait when the subject was animals now, so he’d change the subject and ask if there was any important mail.

“There’s an upcoming cow paddy bingo event. Tickets are $5.00.

How many do you think we should buy?”

“What’s cow paddy bingo?”

“A field downtown is sectioned off with numbers and a well-fed cow is led around in a circular pattern. When he drops his
paddy
, the crowd goes wild because the person with the number the cowflop falls on has bingo and wins 500 bucks!”

“Can’t beat Friday night entertainment in the mountains.”

“I’ve also got a letter here asking for my support in a pig protection campaign, and I’ll have you know the association is not a police activist group. No, these are real live pigs they’re talking about and they need our help. I’m supposed to check the box that says,
‘Yes! I want to make a commitment today to help FREE pigs from the crate’
and send in a donation of $20- $100. Quick, honey. Get out your checkbook. The pigs of the world need us.”

Mark lifted one skeptical eyebrow. “You are already doing your part. You didn’t make me bacon this morning.”

I pointed to the letter and quoted,
“If we treated dogs and cats the way we treat pigs, there would be a public outcry and the abusers would be thrown in jail!”

“I do like pigs.” Mark said. “I like them best as bacon. Pork chops are good too.”

“‘
Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you – give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.’
Winston Churchill said that!”

Mark sighed. “Didn’t we send money to the Heifer Corp. recently?”

“For a goat, yes. I also sent money to the ASPCA, but we haven’t done our part to protect pigs. Of that, I am sure.”

“I’m going to the house site. If you really want to save a pig, go ahead and write a check, but remember we have limited resources. A donation might mean we have to skip something we need, like a decent stove.”

I kissed the top of his head. “Don’t worry. I want a good stove in the new house more than I want to save the world one pig at a time.”

But after he left, I picked the letter up and read the text through, shocked to learn just how dire the plight of pigs really is. The poor animals are kept in gestation crates two feet wide, their movement so severely restricted they can’t even turn around. They’re forced to sleep, eat, and live in metal crates and continually produce litters of piglets. When the piglets are three weeks old, they’re torn from the mother and the breeding cycle begins again. Apparently, pigs live in this misery for several years and then unmercifully they are slaughtered, ending up bacon on my husband’s plate...when I remember to cook him bacon, that is.

I tossed the letter aside, thinking ignorance really had been bliss because I now had to add this picture to my growing awareness of mass farm production sins. A person may feel less guilt-ridden eating bacon from a pig they don’t know by name, but I was starting to think that was like being an army general sitting in his cushy office, pushing a button to drop a bomb on an innocent village with no remorse. The fact that a person has distance from a moral dilemma doesn’t relieve them of responsibility. I still had trouble understanding how my neighbors had the stomach to slaughter and eat their own dear pets, even though I knew (academically) that bringing up a happy, free-range animal in your backyard, and giving the animal a life of dignity and a reasonable length of time on this earth is better than supporting inhumane pig farming by playing dumb to the facts. I got it—farm animals are not pets—but live creatures who feel suffering.

A vegetarian lifestyle was sounding more attractive every day. I ended up sending $20 to the pig protection campaign because the pictures of
Sugar Bear,
a rescued pig at a Farm Sanctuary, tugged at my heartstrings. Then I went to the grocery store to buy bacon for Mark’s breakfast the next day. My entire life felt like this, a huge complex struggle between my emerging new ideals and my old life patterns. The dichotomy filled my mind with clashing realities as much as it did my grocery cart.

One day, I stopped by the feed store to pick up grain and came face to face with a dozen incubators filled with day-old birds. The spring chicks peeped joyously, bouncing around like little yellow cotton balls with feet. Keeping a few chickens would not only be educational, but an economical thing to do, I reasoned. And offering a fifty acre home to chickens might create good karma to make up for my part in worldwide pig abuse.

I’d read that most chickens lay an egg a day. Each chick was three dollars. I did the math. With eggs selling for about $2 a dozen, each chicken, once grown, would pay for herself within a few weeks. I’d keep harvesting free eggs forever after that, a far more productive outcome than keeping a goat, and a drop in the bucket compared to horses.

Each cage contained a unique breed, all of which would grow up to have significantly different traits. I put on my glasses to get a better look at the pictures taped to the cages. Did I want the fat, traditional sort of hen with feathered feet, or the leaner chickens with afro head feathers and other fancy details? I knew I wanted chickens that were prolific egg layers and maybe a rooster with hearty vocal chords to wake me with a song, but beyond that, I didn’t have much preference when it came to poultry.

The owner of the shop, Linda, was a remarkable source of livestock knowledge. She explained that all the females would lay eggs and all the males would crow, so my paltry poultry requirements wouldn’t narrow the selection process at all. Some cages contained pre-sexed chicks, but others offered general run chicks, which meant their sex would be revealed as they matured. I could save fifty cents a bird by trusting the luck of the draw.

“You want brown eggs, white eggs, or green?” Linda asked, bending over to blow a little kiss to the pet chicken mascot that sat on the counter to greet and entertain customers. Her pet chicken wore a tiny red bow in her silky feathers. A class act, that chicken.

“Green? As in green eggs and ham?”

“Green, as in they aren’t white or brown. You won’t have to waste time coloring them for Easter, if that counts for anything. If you want big eggs, pick a Leghorn; if you don’t mind smaller eggs, go with a Hatch Claret. They’re survivors so you won’t have to worry so much about predators.”

“I don’t see predators as being a problem. I just want good, natural eggs. Like the ones in the grocery store.”

“The eggs you get from these girls will not be like those at the grocery store,” she said, offended by my comparison. “Homegrown eggs provide better nutrition. They make your baked goods rise 30% more. You’ll see. My advice is to pick the chickens you want, rather than thinking about egg color. You want sitters?”

“I don’t know. Do I?”

“Sitters will get broody and hatch out eggs for you, but remember, they won’t lay for a term when they sit, and they’re slower, thus easier for a predator to pick off.”

Again, with the predator comment. The woman must be paranoid.

“Chickens with feathered feet are generally good sitters. The barelegged chickens will lay, but their natural instincts have been bred out of them so they won’t sit on a nest. In other words, they’ll never reproduce on their own.”

“Where does the next generation come from then?”

“An incubator, of course. Science breeds the perfect chicken to meet our needs now. The hens that do their work diligently and produce well have no instinct to be mothers.”

“That describes some of my friends.”

Linda laughed. “You have kids?”

“Three.”

“Well, kids love chickens no matter what kind you pick.”

She wasn’t wrong about that. When I picked Neva up from school and brought her back to pick out whatever chicks struck her fancy you’d think I had offered her the world. We lingered in the feed store a long time, marveling at the selection of ducks, chicks, bunnies and turkeys. An hour later we were driving home with a dozen peeping birds in a cardboard box and gleefully picking a fitting name for each bird. I suggested Cacciatore, Gumbo, and Fricassee, but she insisted on names like Rainbow, Princess, and Fluffy. Her impish smile and the gentle way she stroked the birds filled my heart with tenderness. I loved these simple moments with my children. Couldn’t get enough of them.

I also bought a cage, a feed trough, a bag of chick starter feed, a water bottle, a clip-on light fixture and a package of light bulbs. My savings calculation in regards to home egg production was a bit off, I realized, as I stuffed the receipt into my handbag.

We set up the chickens in a heated cage when we got home, the little puffballs orienting themselves to their new environment with nary a glitch. For several weeks, the birds squeaked away in the corner of our cabin under the endless glow of the warming light. Neva spent hours gently holding the babies, talking to them and trying to teach them tricks. It was chicken nirvana, until one day we heard a squeak and our cat trotted by with a helpless, fluttering Silky chick in his mouth. The cat had stuck his paw between the bars of the cage and pulled the baby through like a kid sliding a cookie out of a bag. We ran after him shouting and throwing things, startling him enough to drop the chick, but it was too late.

I repositioned the cage on a high dresser and covered it with a towel so the cat couldn’t strike again. Meanwhile, Neva spent the afternoon coloring a cardboard gravestone with the words:
Here lies Silky, little chick.

We held a solemn funeral ceremony, complete with song, tears, and words of apology to the chicken gods. I wanted to treat the moment with the serious respect my little girl believed it deserved, but her sensitivity was so darn cute I just wanted to abscond her homemade gravestone to keep in a scrapbook for years to come. I avoided Mark’s eyes to keep from laughing and settled with storing the memory in my mind for all time.

“When Linda said I had to watch for predators, it never occurred to me that
predators
included our household cat,” I said to Mark that night.

“It’s just that the chicks are so little. When they get bigger, taking care of them will be easier,” he said, with as much confidence in his chicken expertise as Colonel Sanders.

The chicks did get bigger and soon started fluttering about the cage, burrowing into the shavings, and knocking over the food bowl. Nothing I did could contain the flying debris that littered the floor and left a film of dust on every piece of furniture in the room.

“These chickens have got to go!” Mark complained, distracted from his building magazines one night when the birds wouldn’t stop their endless cackling.

The chicks had feathered out, which meant they looked more like chickens than furry Twinkies with feet now, so they were old enough to survive without a constant light bulb for warmth. I moved the cage out to the porch and bought a second cage, second feed trough, second water bottle, and more shavings so the bigger birds had more room to move around. Still, five or six adolescent chickens in each cage made a daunting mess. Our porch looked like a giant hamster cage. Smelled like one, too.

“These birds will be free ranging on our land soon enough,” I said to Mark as I swept the porch for the third time that day while everyone else was getting ready for the family’s big night out at the drive-in. “Once this stage is over, we’ll have maintenance-free chickens forevermore.”

“I’m counting on it,” Mark said, slipping on a pile of slick chicken poop as he brought blankets and a bag of snacks to the car.

The movie playing at the drive-in that night was
Chicken Little
. All five of us huddled in the car sharing buckets of popcorn and Twizzlers. I had wonderful memories of going to the drive-in with my family when I was a kid, so every time we went I imagined we were forging memories that would last forevermore. The movie itself was but an afterthought. It was the togetherness I loved.

Two hours later we came home to find the dogs had knocked over one of the cages and apparently decided young chickens would make fun chew toys. The porch was a war zone of feathers and deceased chickens. Another funeral ensued. We were down to only five chickens from our original dozen now.

“It never occurred to me predators might include the cat
and
the family puppy,” I mumbled, thinking Linda should have been more specific. Or perhaps I should have asked more questions.

Even five chickens were too many for a porch once the birds grew to be full size. For their own good and for my housekeeping sanity, these chickens had to go. But, where? I had planned on free-range chickens roaming our land, waking us every morning with a joyful crow and eggs to start the day, but our house wasn’t yet finished. Then again, the donkey, horses and goat had taken up residence on our land already, so why not move the chickens out there as well? They could wander freely among the tall blades of grass, scratching and foraging just like the chickens at the post office and in yards all over town. I’d even set them up a nice box for shelter with food and water at the ready, and they’d be far happier living free and easy rather than trapped in a cage on our porch.

Mark agreed it was a good idea, so the next day, we brought the chickens to our land and set them free. The birds immediately scurried into the pasture to scratch amidst the horse dung. If it wasn’t so darned corny, I’d have burst out in a rendition of “Born Free.” I watched them revel in the sunshine for an hour or more until it was time to go.

“What if they’re scared of the dark?” Neva asked as we left.

“Chickens have survived the dark for thousands of years. They won’t mind,” I said. “Besides which, they’ll sleep in the little box I’ve set up. Tomorrow they’ll probably be perched on the fence, waiting to be fed right along with the donkey.”

Only the next day when we visited the land again, nary a feather was in sight.

“Do you think they ran away?” Neva asked.

“Perhaps they’re hiding in the trees,” I said, squinting as I looked into the branches overhead. No chickens.

We spent a good hour calling out to them, but in the end, concluded that those ungrateful chickens had indeed run away.

“I guess my chickens took off,” I said to Ronnie when I stopped by to see the progress on the house later that day.

Mark looked away uneasily.

Ronnie dug his hands into his pockets and grinned. “You just let a bunch of chickens loose out here? At night? Without a chicken coop for shelter?”

“A chicken coop? Um... I did put a box up in a tree limb for them to sleep in.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “I hate to tell you, but all you done last night was feed the coyotes and possums. I’m sure they appreciated it.”

“No sir! You really think something ate my chickens?”

“Probably a weasel or a raccoon. Maybe it was a hawk or owl. Might be a stray dog or two. Could be a fox, of course. Just about everything eats chicken, ‘cept maybe that donkey of yours.”

“Cats and dogs like chickens, too,” Mark said with a grin.

It occurred to me the list of potential killers was getting mighty long and I might as well add myself to it, considering my stupidity. “But what about all those free range chickens I see wandering around at the post office and in people’s yards? Those birds somehow survive.”

“Those chickens only free range during the day. They get tucked away at night in a chicken coop so they don’t become sitting ducks.” “Oh.”

Not much in the mood for more funerals, I decided to stick with the
they ran away
story for Neva and I suggested she pick out a few more chicks at the feed store. This time, we’d build a chicken coop before setting them free. Since young girls are far more enamored with chicks than with adult chickens, Neva didn’t mind starting over. Another dozen chicks took up residency in our family room. They too moved to the porch a month later. They too made a debilitating mess that made everyone feel as if we were living in a barn and they too drove Mark to eventually put his foot down and order a chicken removal.

“If you want me to install them on the land, I’ll need a chicken coop,” I said. “Can you pause a few hours from building the house and make me one?”

“No way. I’m busy. You should have thought about that before you began the experiment.”

I had come prepared for his answer. I pointed to an ad in the local paper that read,
Local carpenter and handyman
.
No job too big or small.
“Why don’t we hire this guy to build us a little chicken house?” I opened a book on small animal housing to a page featuring a basic chicken coop and held it up so Mark could stare at the plans.

Mark flipped a few pages, nodding at the nifty animal housing options in the book. “Okay. But I want to talk to the guy and make the arrangements myself.”

Delighted, I set up a meeting. The handyman, Erick, met us the next day and we gave him the plans. The picture of my coveted chicken coop was simple, just a little shed with a door and a cartoon drawing of a little chicken going into a small, square hole, like a doggy door. I told Erick not to bother with the inside of the coop, because I had ordered ready-made chicken nesting boxes.

Mark arranged for Erick to go shopping for the materials that afternoon so the project could get underway the very next day. A few hours later Erick called Mark, asking if he could drop by the receipt for reimbursement. The materials bill came to $1,600.00.

Mark called me. “What did you ask him to build? We could fly to Europe and order an omelet for what our eggs are going to end up costing us!”

“I showed you the plans in advance. It was just a little shed with a little chicken dancing by the door. How was I to know wood cost so much?”

“I buy wood all the time and it doesn’t cost that much!” Mark yelled.